Patricia Owens and Katharina Rietzler, "Women's International Thought: A New History" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Summary

Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is the first cross-disciplinary history of women's international thought. Bringing together some of the foremost historians and scholars of international relations working today, this book recovers and analyzes the path-breaking work of eighteen leading thinkers of international politics from the early to mid-twentieth century. Recovering and analyzing this important work, the essays offer revisionist accounts of IR's intellectual and disciplinary history and expand the locations, genres, and practices of international thinking. Systematically structured, and focusing in particular on Black diasporic, Anglo-American, and European historical women, it does more than 'add women' to the existing intellectual and disciplinary histories from which they were erased. Instead, it raises fundamental questions about which kinds of subjects and what kind of thinking constitutes international thought, opening new vistas to scholars and students of international history and theory, intellectual history and women's and gender studies.

Patricia Owens is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include twentieth-century international history and theory, historical and contemporary practices of Anglo-American counterinsurgency and military intervention, and disciplinary history and the history of international and political thought. Her most recent book, Economy of Force, published by Cambridge University Press, won, among others, the 2016 Susan Strange Prize for the Best Book in international studies and the 2016 International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award. Owens’s first book was Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt, published by Oxford University Press in 2007.

Katharina Rietzler teaches American, women's and international history at the University of Sussex, UK. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of Global History, Diplomatic History, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Global Society and in several edited collections. Rietzler’s main research interest is the history of international thought and internationalism in its social, political, economic and legal dimensions from the 1910s to the 1960s. She is currently completing a book on 20th-century US philanthropy, international thought and the "problem of the public."

Zifeng Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Black left feminism and Mao’s China.

Kelvin Ng is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.

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